More extracts of Kelvin MacKenzie’s Spectator article are emerging this afternoon. He’s hitting back hard at his then rival publications:

“I was by no means the only man in Fleet Street who believed the police’s story. The Daily Star headline on the same day said ‘Dead fans robbed by drunk fans’. The Daily Mail said, ‘They were drunk and violent and their actions were vile.’ The Daily Express said, ‘Police saw “sick spectacle of pilfering from the dying”.’ All of these stories are collected in the Hillsborough Independent Panel report: I was far from alone.

As the report also shows, even a fine journalist like Peter McKay was taken in by police deflecting their mistakes on to the fans when he wrote in the London Evening Standard that the ‘catastrophe was caused first and foremost by violent enthusiasm for soccer and in this case the tribal passions of Liverpool supporters [who] literally killed themselves and others to be at the game.’ And closer to home in the Liverpool Daily Post, John Williams wrote: ‘The gatecrashers wreaked their fatal havoc … Their uncontrolled fanaticism and mass hysteria… literally squeezed the life out of men, women and children … yobbism at its most base … Scouse killed Scouse for no better reason than 22 men were kicking a ball.’ It is difficult to accuse him of an anti-Liverpool bias.”